Discomposure
by lightofhislife
Summary: My thoughts on what Lily's boggart would be; one-shot.


**DISCLAIMER: No character/magicky thing belongs to me.**

Green eyes combed her sons face. Though closed, she stared as if she could see the green of his eyes. His father's face, of course, but that one attribute stemmed from her. It proved her claim as his mother. The mother of a beautiful boy, only days old. Lily felt exhausted, of course, from the process of giving birth. It was thoroughly easier at St. Mungo's than it would've been in a Muggle hospital. She knew from seeing a special on the television over the summer before her fourth year. Certain parts were obscured with little blurs, but the screams and cries of the woman resonated clearly through the tinny speakers of the old television.

One of the snaps on her son's onsie had come undone, catching her attention as she laid him down to nap. Lily refastened it, sighing. Half lidded eyes told her it was time to sleep, time to rest. Her son was quite the diversion at the times she should've slept. Breathing deeply into her nose, she supressed a yawn and lifted a toy broom provided by Sirius for when Harry was big enough to use it. Lily put it down on a rocking chair and exited the room.

Sirius was likely the most excited person, aside from James, to have a young mind to corrupt with knowledge of the secret passages in Hogwarts and the best ways to sneak into Hogsmeade before one was old enough to go. Lily laughed gently at the thought of her son, marauding with three like-minded followers. _Maybe they, too, would have nicknames_, she mused, _and maybe Harry would have a soft enough heart to befriend, rather than terrorize, those with less popularity. People like…_She didn't even like to think of him anymore. Not after he called her a Mudblood. That rift had made everything more difficult. Made everything more painful.

Lily entered her bedroom, flicking her wand to provide enough light to draw her curtains and change into yellow pajamas. At the moment that the distinctly warm material touched her skin, not as stiff as the material of her jeans, she knew that laying down to slip into dreams of her son growing up would be to slip into bliss. The clothing she shed looked like snakeskin in a heap like that, fallen on the floor next to one of James' shirts. Resisting temptation to leave it there, she scooped the pile into one arm and flipped the wicker cylinder in which she stored unclean laundry open. The first thing she saw was a black mass swirling from the opening and landing before her in the fashion of a Death Eater. Her husband stood before her, straight from the basket and looking shaken. "Lily," he reached toward her; she shrank from his grasp. The manifestation was not her husband but one of the awful shapeshifters that Professor Malfrukt had warned her class of. "Lily, Harry, they've hurt him," he urged. "He's dead, Lily."

Why could she not vocalize the spell?

Riddikulus.

_Because it isn't,_ she reasoned_. It could happen at any time._ At any point, they could come for him as revenge for her husband's refusal to join them. _Why would that want someone who'd married a-a-,_ she saw no need to censor her thoughts._ A mudblood._

But they did.

With the same yearning that Lily had for protecting her son, still a priority over her aching desire to destroy this monster and put the laundry away. Weeks before, he boggart would've been towering and sallow figure wearing a black, the only color she'd noted his wearing when he wasn't in school uniform. She had rarely seen him looking any way but ungainly, though that look was gone now, replaced with sheer menace. Each of this sort of boggart she encountered would extend one arm and jerk the sleeve back, his brow furrowed angrily and twitching. Burned into his skin, clear as Lily's pain, was a skull and snake, intertwined like repeated and mysterious deaths of Muggles and Wizards alike.

"Lily?" James was calling her from downstairs, receiving no answer from his wife but only cries from their son, who'd awoken. Her son was not hurt. This made her sure of it.

"Riddikulus!" she said, thinking of her son subconsciously but projecting a memory of her husband, still at Hogwarts, wearing his tie around his head and drunkenly singing "A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love" by Celestina Warbeck.

Seeing this once more, it ignited a flaming smile beginning at her lips and in her lungs. When the two blazes met, her mouth burst open, emitting smoking bursts of laughter.

"I thought it was a smashing rendition," James smiled with eyes reflecting the flames of his wife's laughter, his son curled against his chest.


End file.
